Web Master Jam Session 2008

Had a great time at Web Master Jam Session - a two day conference held this year in Atlanta on Oct 3-4. This was my first time attending this conference and I would definitely repeat. 

Speakers all seemed to be professional web developers and designers who were good at providing insights into issues and techniques for building world class professional web sites. 

Some of the sessions I attended were

The Bigness of Smallness - John Moore

Universal by Design - James Craig

Going Social - Chris Perry

The Web Planning Process - Jason Ford

Design Lessons in Chess - Rob Weychert

Web Application Interface Design - Garrett Dimon

Striking a Balance - Nathan Smith

There was a general session "Web site smackdown" where a panel of experts criquited submitted websites. Another general session was really interesting as Mike Culver, web services evangelist at Amazon Web Services, spoke about Amazon Mechanical Turk. 

The venue for the conference was pretty cool...a place I haven't been in Atlanta called the Loudermilk Center located on Courtland near the Georgia State campus. 

One of the best outcomes of the conference for me was starting to follow many of the speakers now on twitter so every day I'm picking up new tips and tricks from this group...kind of like the gift that keeps on giving. 

Since the main sponsor, Coffee Cup Software, has moved their headquarters from Dallas to Atlanta the conference will probably be held in Atlanta next year I'm guessing. Hope I get to attend.  

Atlanta Python Rocks

I attended Sept Atlanta Python meetup last night. As usual this meetup is packed with info on the latest and coolest in computing...Adobe Flex (as a front end to python of course), an intro to Amazon Web Services, and a Google App Engine app for an iphone. The AWS talk focused on EC2 and the new elastic block storage (think virtual hard drive). And the flex talk highlighted PyAMF which provides the integration between Adobe Flex/Flash and most popular python frameworks.

This meeting everyone introduced themselves...good to see many people were new to python. And I'm always encouraged when I see a bunch of old guys (like me) still hanging in there staying in the game. As a bonus I learned about a cool video training site for python and ruby called ShowMedo and a new blog to follow on cloud computing by a local (to Atlanta) guy, John Willis, who heads up the local Atlanta cloud computing meetup, AWSome.

.NET University comes to Atlanta

Today I had the opportunity to attend .NET University at the Microsoft offices in Alpharetta. .NET U is a free one day class on new and emerging Microsoft technologies like Biztalk, .NET 3.0, and Sharepoint. The class I attended today was on ASP.NET. I continue to be amazed at the quality of training available free of charge from Microsoft. The two instructors for today's class were both top of their field who you will see presenting in events that cost hundreds of dollars. Microsoft also provided a nice lunch free of charge. The concept of .NET University is to provide all the course materials, handouts, labs, and powerpoint and to encourage it's reuse by anybody willing to take th e time to present. So it's a great resource for internal training or user groups. I look forward to future offerings of .NET U in Atlanta.

Python Is Coming

Yesterday evening (7:30 til 10:00) I attended the Atlanta Python user's group meeting held at Georgia Tech's Food Processing Center. The main presentation was about Google's new App engine...a complete application development and hosting environment utilizing Google's infrastructure. Right now the only development language supported is Python and App engine is in beta limited to around 10,000 developers. Last week I received my app engine developers account from Google and so was excited to see a presentation on it at the python meeting. The most important insight I gained from the presentation is that the apps database engine supports flat tables only...no joins between tables (arrrrrgh). Although tables can be linked and there is good referential integrity between tables. So the take away is think lists not tables…denormalize your data structure…and put everything you need to deliver a record to the web into a single record. Well this is just the beta...wonder what Google's plans are moving forward? Hopefully we'll get a better db at some point. Wish I was attending Google's I/O conference in two weeks in San Fran...where all questions regarding the app engine will probably be answered. For more information on the Google App Engine here's a presentation on youtube on how to create and deploy an application using the app engine. And it's very interesting that Python is now number seven on the Tiobe programming index, one position ahead of C# and two positions up from Ruby. Python seems to be on the rise as the language of choice in the web 2.0 hacker community.

Microsoft Heros 2008 Launch Event

Today I attended Microsoft's launch event for Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008 held at Georgia's International Convention Center in College Park. This event was completely sold out with thousands in attendance. It makes me realize just how large and dominant Microsoft really is. The keynote kicked things off in the morning. Followed up by breakout sessions on all three of the new products. I was excited to find the giveaway was free production copies of Windows Server 2008, Vista Ulitimate, and Visual Studio 2008...very cool. I also snagged a free video training DVD for Windows Server 2008 that should help me through the install. The big news on Windows Server 2008 is virtualization and a smaller attack surface...and built-in support for PHP...I suppose to make it easier to migrate from Linux to Windows. Visual Studio just keeps getting better...IMHO the best IDE on the market. (I've even heard James Gosling, father of Java, practically say this before). One nice new feature of 2008 is a split window when editing pages so the rendered view is available in one window while code is seen in the other. Now to see if Windows Server 2008 will even install on my old Dell (pre 2003) servers *sigh*

Clouds on the Horizon

Clouds aren't always a bad thing as often they bring a much needed resource to a thirsty environment. Today I attended the Tour de force roadshow by Salesforce.com, an all day event focused on their new "on demand" cloud (PaaS) solution Force.com. Force.com is a high end version of the new cloud application builders like Quickbase, DabbleDB, Google App Engine, and Coghead where the entire application runs on hosted services and is accessed completely inside your browser thus eliminating the cost of buying and maintaining on-premise technology stacks like servers, databases, etc.

I like the Force.com byline of "Innovation not infrastructure" which makes alot of sense nowadays in this world of "always on" network computing. One issue I'm always hearing with regard to the cloud model is that of data security. "How can I trust someone else to keep my data secure?" Salesforce addressed this concern extensively citing customers in financial and healthcare industries using force.com (which is SAS 70 certified).

I'm always struck by the large numbers of people drawn to these Salesforce events. They are always packed. As usual for a Salesforce event this one was first class. Held at the downtown Hyatt they provided real force.com development books for each attendee...hands on labs....partner booths....keynote...and three different breakout tracks (1) force.com basics, (2) apex language programming for experienced force.com developers, and (3) SaaS startups based on the force.com platform. This 3rd track for startups was of particular interest. They paraded several startup software companies across stage with testimonials of bringing new products to market in record time (months not years) with little risk all based on the Force.com platform. Innovation not Infrastructure.

And I can't forget to mention the nice lunch and post event reception with free drinks and yummy hors d'oeuvres.

Atlanta Code Camp

I just got home from the 4th Atlanta Code Camp attended by approximately 350 dedicated passionate IT professionals evidenced by giving up their entire Saturday to be there. The venue host was DeVry University Decatur campus just a few miles from my home.

I've attended all four Atlanta Codecamps and this was definitely the best yet. Codecamps tend to be a full day affair beginning at 8:30 and ending around 6pm. And you have to stay until the end to participate in the highlight...a grand giveaway of the best prizes and swag you will ever see at any technology event. At every past codecamp I've always been the "Charlie Brown" as one of the few there winning absoutely nothing (almost everybody wins something). But this year I won a 4 gig Zune and a 5lb book on ASP.Net 3.5 development. I couldn't believe how my luck has suddenly changed for the better.

The day started off well when I attended my first session on how to setup 3rd party hosted ASP.Net sites and found the presenter is a fan of WebHost4Life the same hosting service I signed up for last week. He gave us a good set of tools like Filezilla and tips for 3rd party hosting that will save me much time and many headaches. Another good session was on the Community Kit for Sharepoint an open source initiative to "fill in" some needed sharepoint functionality around blogs, wikis, and forms based authentication. I can't wait to install the new enhanced blog solution on our sharepoint 2007 portal.

Codecamp is a wonderful learning event with a full money back guarantee (it's free). The only bad part is the lack of a wireless connection all day. This year they fed us grilled burgers and dogs with all the trimmings or veggie pizza for lunch.

Some of the new tools I gained from camp were Filezilla ftp client, WSPBuilder, Sharepoint Skinner, Sharepoint Manager 2007, .Net Reflector, and how to create a 12 hive toolbar. Guess I can't ask for a refund this year :)